Dhamaal 4 review: A film in its own special category of lazy

The film begins with a suspiciously AI-generated-looking prologue about pirates — you read that correctly. Years later, a collection of greedy buffoons sets out on a quest to locate treasure that these pirates left hidden.

The ‘un’fantastic four

At the forefront of this group is a man named Guddu, played by Ajay Devgn. Guddu is in love with a widow — her being a widow is somehow important to the plot — but is certain that she will reject him unless he can prove his wealth. Hence, the mad dash for the buried treasure.

Then there is Lallan, played by Riteish Deshmukh. In his introductory scene, Lallan visits a temple and prays for the daughter of a rich man to fall in love with him; he’s like the protagonist of Obsession (the 2025 Hollywood film directed by Curry Barker), except the movie has no clue that Obsession was a satire of men like him.

Note that Lallan doesn’t wish for a woman who happens to be rich herself; his purpose would still have been served. He wishes for the daughter of a rich man. The Gods play a joke on him and in walks a young lady whose only purpose in the movie is to be made fun of. The lady, you see, is what an Indian aunty would describe as “healthy”. Lallan is aghast, but he’s willing to marry an overweight woman — the movie can’t imagine anything worse — if there’s money in it for him. Little does he know that the woman’s father isn’t some wealthy industrialist, but a chauffeur. Cute of the movie to teach Lallan a lesson, but that doesn’t excuse the nearly half-a-dozen scenes where you’re expected to laugh at the woman’s expense.

“Tujhe burger ke chakkar mein vada pao mil gaya (You got a vada pao instead of the burger you wanted),” one character says tauntingly to Lallan. Then, there’s a gag where Lallan’s wife hops onto his bike and the bike promptly tips over. They wheelie through town while everyone stares. How hilarious.

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The third protagonist is Adi, played by Arshad Warsi. Joined at the hip with his brother Manav, played by Jaaved Jafferi, Adi is determined to slither back into his estranged wife’s good graces. But Manav, a person with intellectual disabilities, can’t help but mess things up. For those keeping score at home, Dhamaal 4 has already mocked people for their weight and intellect, and this is only in the first 30 minutes. Over the course of the following hour and a half, it will also find time to mock people for their height and for the complexion of their skin.

Lazy attempt

The movie doesn’t require much of an effort from anybody, including the audience. It seems as if Devgn shot many of his scenes separately, perhaps in an empty room at his house that was hastily curtained in green screens. There are entire sequences in Dhamaal 4 with shoddier chroma key work than you’d recall seeing in an Aaj Tak weather report from the early 2000s. The three sets of characters don’t even cross paths until midway through the film, during a set piece that has been done to death in numerous Bollywood films already, but was probably first lifted from Ali G Indahouse (2002 British comedy). Other recent movies that director Indra Kumar seems to have taken “inspiration” from are Uncharted (2022 Hollywood action film) and Jungle Cruise (2021 fantasy adventure film), which, as anybody who has seen them would attest, weren’t even that good.

But movies like Dhamaal 4 occupy their own special category of laziness. Often, it seems like they came up with stuff on the fly, which isn’t an unheard-of way to make comedy movies — American filmmaker Judd Apatow made a career out of it — but requires a quick-thinking director who knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Nothing about Indra Kumar’s past work would indicate that he knows how to do this. Instead, he inserts references to himself in one scene where Lallan spots a rainbow and quips, “Kitna sundar Indra Kumar hai (Such a pretty Indra Kumar).” It’s a harmless joke, but one that leaves you with a more existential question: who is Dhamaal 4 even targeted at? Would anyone in the audience recognise Indra Kumar by name? Perhaps they might remember him as the man whose movies their parents would sternly steer them away from in the 1990s, movies like Beta, Dil and Ishq.

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While Jafferi, Warsi, and Deshmukh can’t be faulted for phoning it in, it honestly feels like Devgn strolled onto set in his own clothes. The actor seems to have settled comfortably into his sequel era; his three recent films were Raid 2, De Pyar De 2, and Son of Sardar 2. Here’s the kicker: none of them even worked! He will soon be seen in Drishyam 3 and Golmaal 5, continuing a streak so suspicious that you have to wonder if it’s all just a giant practical joke.

But that would require a sense of humour, wouldn’t it?